Any of you who have read this blog for a while know I am just a little obsessive about my storage needs, and the means to back ’em up…. just in case. I’ve been rethinking my strategies lately, especially in light of putting the new eight-headed monstrosity under my desk.

I talked with someone at work — one of our storage guys — around Christmas about my hard drive strategy. He’d just bought a DSLR, and was looking for suggestions. I think he was surprised that I had spent so much time and effort to ensure that my files were safe. A storage guy was surprised at how I was approaching storage? That must mean I’m doing something right.

So tonight, I started catching up on a billion newsfeed entries — I’ve been a little lax in keeping up with feeds over the last month or so — and I found a great piece by Michael Stewart that talks about drives, specifically, although it also gets into RAID configurations and drive enclosure technologies.

I didn’t read anything in this piece that I disagreed with. I love the idea of big drives for archival storage, and the more devices those drives are in, the better. I think FW800 rocks although eSATA really has my attention, despite having no eSATA gear. I’m also kinda intrigued by using fast, small drives for system drives and cache drives. With eSATA on the outside of the box, having the smaller drives eating up the space inside the case doesn’t seem like such a bad thing. And frankly, if there’s time in an emergency, it’d be very easy to pull the eSATA drive array(s), tuck ’em under my arm, and run away with them. It’s harder to do that with the Octoputer.

So, if you’re paranoid about your drives (like me), read this piece, look at some of my old rambles about storage and backups, and protect your data! Once I get my new strategy figured out, I’ll write about it, and give you more to chew on.